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Latest European Commission Report asserts that Youth Guarantee initiatives are not sufficiently adapted to overcome the barriers faced by young people with disabilities

As part of its work, to ensure that all young people under the age of 25 years receive a good quality offer of employment, continued education, apprenticeship or training, the European Commission has launched two new reports on the Youth Guarantee (YG).

The Guarantee, which commits all EU Members States to ensuring that all young people receive an offer of employment, continued education, apprenticeship or training, within 4 months of becoming unemployed or leaving formal education, was launched in 2013. Since 2014:

More than 5 million young people have registered in YG schemes each year

More than 3.5 million young people registered in the YG took up an offer of employment, continued education, a traineeship or an apprenticeship every year.

More than two thirds of young people who left the Youth Guarantee in 2016 took up an offer of employment, education, traineeship or apprenticeship.

The Youth Employment Initiative has provided direct support to over 1.7 million young people across the EU.

To enable more young people to access the benefits of the guarantee the European Commission has released a report on activation measures for young people in vulnerable situations which displays promising practices that help young people with more specific needs to be able to access the same opportunities as others.

The report asserts that many Youth Guarantee interventions are often not sufficiently adapted to the needs of those facing multiple barriers, such as poverty, social exclusion, disability and discrimination. The report attributes the inability of many schemes to adapt to a number of factors, including a limited knowledge of the specific needs of different NEET groups, lack of low-threshold offers, insufficient geographical coverage (often in rural areas) and complexity of registration procedures.

To change this, the European Commission included a number of best practices in the report, including one from EASPD member: the Lino Spiteri Foundation. The report details the Foundation’s work to support the labour market integration of jobseekers with disabilities with a job-carving approach. As a result of the foundation’s work, by April 2018 it was possible to create 278 more jobs for jobseekers with disabilities.

Having provided feedback on the development of the report and the failure for many YG programmes to be fully accessed by young people with disabilities, EASPD welcomes the report and its efforts to enable all young people to benefit from the Guarantee.